August 26, 2013

According to this study in PLOS One, Facebook use predicts negative shifts in subjective well-being in the short term and the long run (thanks to Josh Shepherd for the pointer). According to the researchers, "On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it." This isn't totally surprising, given earlier research on the topic, but it's interesting nonetheless. It should be noted that another study suggests it might be a good idea to post more often if you're feeling lonely...

December 06, 2008

This paper in progress suggests that people who are unaware of the price of the wine they are drinking, don't derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. Apparently, the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less. For individuals with wine training, however, there is a positive relationship between price and enjoyment. The researchers conclude: "the prices of wines and wine recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers."

This research reminds me of the shortcomings of surrogation. When we surrogate in order to predict our emotional futures--forecast affect-- it isn't a bad idea to consult surrogates who are similar to us. In alot of cases, consulting a surrogate will work better than just using your imagination, but in some cases, in the wine case, just any old surrogate won't do. In other words, bring on the Carlo Rossi, baby!

September 28, 2008

I've been on a happiness hiatus. Ironically, the only thing getting in the way of my well-being has been my dissertation on well-being! Let's review what has happened on the happiness front in the past seven weeks.

1) It has been shown that your serotonin levels effect how you play the ultimatum game. Apparently, low serotonin levels probilify the rejection of unfair offers. The researchers concluded that "5-HT plays a critical role in regulating emotionduring social decision-making."

6) The August issue of Psychological Science contains a fascinating article by Eugene M. Caruso, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson on the phenomenon known as temporal value asymmetry.

7) Randy Newman has remarked that "short people got no reason to live."

Turns out, they're pretty miserable too...

This article suggests that "the main reason why taller people do better is because they have higher incomes, they are better educated, and they work in higher status occupations."

8) According to this article, "Between 1980 and 1985, only 2,125 articles were published on happiness, compared with 10,553 on depression. From 2000 to 2005, the number of articles on happiness increased sixteenfold to 35,069, while articles on depression numbered 80,161. From 2006 to present, just over 2 1/2 years, a search found 27,335 articles on happiness, more than half the 53,092 found on depression."

9) According to recent research the experience of positive emotions was more strongly related to life satisfaction than the absence of negative emotions across nations. However, "negative emotional experiences were more negatively related to life satisfaction in individualistic than in collectivist nations, and positive emotional experiences had a larger positive relationship with life satisfaction in nations that stress self-expression than in nations that value survival. These findings show how emotional aspects of the good life vary with national culture and how this depends on the values that characterize one's society. Although to some degree, positive and negative emotions might be universally viewed as desirable and undesirable, respectively, there appear to be clear cultural differences in how relevant such emotional experiences are to quality of life."

10) According to a recent study in the journal, BMC Cancer, women who suffered two or more traumatic events in their life, such as losing a loved one, had a 62 per cent greater risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer, but optimistic women were 25 per cent less likely to develop the disease. This study definitely deserves a closer look.

11) According to this article, conventional retributivist and utilitarian conceptions of punishment must accommodate our ability to adapt to changed circumstances (including fines and imprisonment) and, somehow, must ameliorate the devastating (unintended) consequences of incarceration (such as unemployment, divorce and disease). These phenomena are obstacles to implementing proportional punishment and creating a marginal deterrent, thus they threaten the foundations of punishment theory.

I take it that a psychological hedonist might claim (I'm not a psychological hedonist, but I have argued this in other places) that Nozick, and those who agree, are hedonists who are making mistakes: they are misinformed or irrational. Thus this data (alone) doesn't show that psychological hedonism is false.

This is all fine and good, but if you accept a desire account of well-being, you need to explain miswanting. According to mental state accounts of well-being, you miswant when you want something that, unbeknownst to you, is going to make you miserable. According to simple preference satisfaction views, the things that make you miserable are good simply in virtue of the fact that you wanted them. You might attempt to accommodate this concern by invoking an informed preference satisfaction account of well-being.

Even if you accept an informed preference satisfaction account of well-being, you need to explain what makes good fortune good (this is, after all, the' hap' in happiness and the 'daimon' in eudaimonia). Often, we don't want this or that, and we don't know it is good for us, but it still turns out to be good for us insofar as we are ultimately glad this or that happened. One might claim the best way to explain this phenomenon is by appealing to a mental state account of well-being (you might also think of this in terms of post facto or retrospective desire satisfaction).

You might also claim that we might want stuff that is bad for us even when we are perfectly informed, in which case we ought to want other stuff (even if we don't want to). If it turns out that some informed people sometimes still prefer reality to the experience machine, we still might say they want wrong (or they're irrational) even though they got all the facts straight, so to speak. Here, I imagine you would need posit some sort of non-instrumental, substantiveview of rationality (a la Kant).*

From a purely dialectical point of view, I take it that if you subscribe to a mental state account of well-being, such as hedonism (personally, I preferenjoyment accounts), you will argue Nozick is begging the question: if you don't already accept desire accounts of well-being you won't be persuaded by the experience machine intuition pump.

2) Research on hedonic adaptation has shown that “Within a few years, paraplegics wind up only slightly less happy on average than individuals who are not paralyzed.” Recently, researchers have shown that, ironically, functionally impaired patients with diseases such as amytrophic lateral sclerosis might be depressed (and, consequently, decline life sustaining treatment) because they don't realize that having the disease won't nessecarily compromise subjective quality of life (if they accept life sustaining treatment). It was also shown that, unsurprisingly, educated patients adapt to the illness better, from a hedonic point of view (this might be surprising if you buy into the myth of the melancholic genius).

3) Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have shown that having strong family ties is a much bigger predictor of contentment than income. This research seems to support the jist of the Easterlin Paradox: money matters up to a point (when basic needs are met), then, other things matter more. In the words of Rebecca J. North, one of the researchers,"Our findings underscore the importance of additional policy indicators that can tap the well-being of individuals and families at the psychosocial level to provide a more comprehensive understanding of a nation's well-being." As I have argued in other places, researchers often forget that money is extrinsically valuable. If it has any influence on subjective well-being, it is probably because of how it is used.

4) It has previously been shown old people are as happy as young people. This is puzzling, in part, because old people spend more time alone, which has been shown to cause (and be caused by) depression. In the current issue of Psychology and Ageing, Bill Von Hipple has shown that "older people are just as satisfied with their social lives because they seem to get much more from the few interactions they have." In other words, the old aren't lonely because the elderly simply adapt, hedonically, to being less social than they used to be.